A Singer’s Guide to Voices: Baritone Pt3
We have reached Part 3, and I am going to draw your attention to the ‘missing link’, the elephant in the room, the Invisible Man. How can I write an article about baritones without mentioning the greatest?
Your wait is over. Behold - Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau!
Readers may remember my story in a Singer’s Life about how I nearly worked with DFD in the aftermath of my success in the Ferrier Prize in 1981, how Gerald Moore tried to set up a lesson and how it sadly never happened. I did however see and hear him several times in the Edinburgh Festival, as the Count in ‘Figaro’, in the Brahms Requiem and singing ‘Winterreise’ in the Usher Hall with Daniel Barenboim. In addition, I think I may have the largest collection of recordings by DFD, certainly in Murrayfield, if not in the world! His double LP, ‘Portrait of the Artist’, bought in about 1970, is one of my most treasured possessions, and I have many more. His extraordinary breadth of repertoire marked him out as exceptional, and the fact that he excelled in all types of music is testimony to his greatness. Some have complained about dips and troughs in his recorded oeuvre, and there is no doubt he was better at some styles than others, but even his “failures” are worth investigating, if only to find out why?
Albert Dietrich Fischer was born in Berlin in 1925, to teacher parents. In 1934, his father added the hyphenated Dieskau to the family name (his mother’s ancestor, Kammerherr von Dieskau was the dedicatee of Bach’s ‘Cantata Burlesque’ (or Peasant Cantata)) and in 1943, he was drafted into the German Army and found himself on the Russian Front, tending horses. Later he was in Italy, as the Germans were forced to retreat, and was captured and remained a prisoner of war of the Americans. His family home was destroyed in the war, and his brother, who had physical and mental problems, was starved to death by the Nazis. These experiences must have haunted him throughout his life, but on his return to Germany he threw himself into a singing career, which started early and blossomed quickly. His debut at what became the Deutsche Oper, Berlin (presently under the musical direction of Sir Donald Runnicles) was as Posa in Verdi’s ‘Don Carlo’, and it is a source of wonder that such a young man (only 23) could possibly sing this big, lyrical role. His rise was meteoric and defied all normal career paths. Soon he was singing all over Europe, in concerts, in operas and in recital, and making recordings of Lieder and opera. In 1951, he first recorded Schubert’s ‘Die Schőne Müllerin’ with Gerald Moore, the same year making his Salzburg Festival debut with Mahler’s ‘Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen’ under Furtwängler, and in 1952 he recorded the role of Kurwenal in Wagner’s ‘Tristan und Isolde’, again with Furtwängler. All of this was long before he was 30 and should be utter madness. It should have heralded a short and crazy career, burning out at an early age. However, it only served to herald the greatest career of any baritone, with regular appearances at Bayreuth, more and more Lieder recordings and recitals throughout the world. He created many world premiere roles and, famously, Benjamin Britten wrote the ‘War Requiem’ for him, along with Peter Pears and Galina Vishnevskaya.
It is not possible to write about all his recordings, as there are so many, but probably his lasting memorial will be his recording of all the songs for male voice written by Schubert, with Gerald Moore. This mammoth undertaking, recorded by Deutsche Grammophon, and completed in 1972, shows the kaleidoscope of vocal colours at his command, and reveals the keen intelligence with which he sang everything. All this singing and recording was accompanied by about 40 cigarettes a day, until he gave up one day in 1982!
These myriad recordings only do partial justice to the beauty and warmth of his voice, and I consider myself very lucky to have heard him at the height of his powers in the early 70s. Of course, he sang some things and some repertoire better than others. Obviously, he was not a Verdi baritone, but lyric roles such as Posa, and subtle parts like Falstaff (vocally subtle, I mean with many nuances), made for interesting listening. His accounts of Christus in the Bach Passions were deeply moving, and some of his Wagner roles (Kurwenal, Gunther, Amfortas, Telramund, Wolfram) remain as standards. His Count in ‘Figaro’ was marvellous – who could resist his ‘perdono’ at the end – although his Don Giovanni was too smart and not sexy enough.
For me, the very peak of his genius was revealed in the recordings he made of Mahler’s Rückert Lieder (with Bőhm) and ‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn’ (with Schwarzkopf and Szell) in the 1960s.
I noticed in some of the material about Fischer-Dieskau that he was sometimes described as having a small, chamber-scale voice. This is complete nonsense. Obviously, compared to Hotter or George London or Thomas Stewart, his voice was on a smaller scale, but I can guarantee that I heard every note and every nuance when he sang ‘Winterreise’ in the Usher Hall. He possessed such a cutting edge and his voice was placed so perfectly, that he could be heard easily in big spaces. The video of him recording the great trio in ‘Gőtterdämmerung’ with Birgit Nilsson and Gottlob Frick, in the film ‘The Golden Ring’, about the making of Decca’s Ring recording, reveals a voice of good size and weight. He could not have sung for so long at Bayreuth without having a big enough voice. Sometimes, in mid-career, it is true, he resorted to bluster, but never for long, and, somehow, he preserved the beauty of his voice throughout his lengthy working life.
When he died in 2012, at the age of 86, I could hardly believe it, as he should have been immortal. I wept for a man I didn’t know because I wanted him always to be here. At least his recorded legacy will remain with us for ever.
How do you follow the greatest of all? Perhaps by looking forward? Maybe, but not just yet.
I need to mention one or two more of the stars of the past.
I am going to start with one I didn’t know and hardly ever heard, Dmitry Hvorostovsky. The reason I am including him is that, on his untimely death from brain cancer in 2017 at the age of 55, people whom I trust wrote and spoke so movingly and fulsomely about him, that I had to go back and listen to some recordings. There I found a baritone of great beauty and consistency, matched to a charisma that is rare to find these days. He excelled in the repertoire of the Verdi baritone, following in the footsteps of the great Yuri Masurok, who I heard often in the 1970s at Covent Garden. His great mane of blond hair made him a matinee idol among opera fans, but all my colleagues spoke about him with such warmth that I regret not meeting him, or really hearing him. His great legacy was a recording of the title role in Tchaikovsky’s ‘Eugene Onegin’, for which he appeared to be ideally cast.
The other great Russian baritone of recent years is Sergei Leiferkus, born in 1946 in Leningrad, a city exhausted by war and famine. I first met Sergei at Scottish Opera, in the early 1980s, when he was cast as Zurga in Bizet’s ‘Pearl Fishers’. The Soviet Union was just beginning to open up with Glasnost and Perestroika, and we were astonished to find ourselves working with one of the finest voices in Russia. In addition, Sergei was a very jolly character, who enjoyed the good life. His French was so-so, or rather worse, but he had such a mellifluous voice and such ease in projection, that we didn’t care! Not surprisingly, he went on very quickly to become a big international star, singing mainly major roles like Scarpia, Iago and Don Giovanni. He always sang with a strong Russian accent, which used to annoy me, but his interpretations were so full on and so charismatic that it was not a huge problem. It was a very individual and unique sound, not traditionally beautiful but instantly recognisable.
In my article about Britten and Vaughan Williams, I drew attention to the phenomenon of the English baritone, a voice beloved of the English composers of the 19th and 20th centuries, and a voice generally not to my taste. However, I should mention in these pages, the doyen of English baritones, John Shirley-Quirk, who was born in 1931 in Liverpool. Annoyingly, I have not been able to find out where the fantastic name came from, and whether it was assumed or real? He was also very hard to categorise vocally. The obituaries, on his death in 2014 at the age of 82, all described him as the catch-all “bass baritone”, but it was not a very Helden sound. Indeed, the only time I met him, in1981, when he was on the panel which awarded me the Decca Kathleen Ferrier Prize that year (along with Janet Baker and Gerald Moore), he came up to me afterwards and we had a chat about voices. He said that he had noticed that I had the same problem as himself, not being able clearly to decide whether to be a bass or a baritone. I was 25 at the time and had the bright top but the bass quality that has confused casting directors on and off for years, in terms of categorisation. He was 50 at the time, and at his peak, but clearly could not decide himself. For me, actually, it was clearer cut, as I simply did not have the high notes necessary for bass-baritone or baritone roles, as he did. He sang roles like Don Giovanni, Count Almaviva, Don Pizarro and Golaud, and had all the baritone roles in ‘Death in Venice’ written for him by Benjamin Britten. He excelled in the Elgar oratorios, and was a fine Christus in the Bach Passions.
As usual, in these articles about singers, I find it difficult to get excited about contemporary baritones. It seems to me that no one really stands out. There are fine generic Verdi baritones singing at Covent Garden, the Met and in Europe, and other good examples of the various genres – German, French, Baroque etc. Perhaps it is the nature of the business now, that singers are travelling even more these days, and one performance is like another, defined only by its location. Perhaps it is the tired eye and ear of an old singer who has heard it all before, and hankers after the past, rather than appreciates the present. There is also a tendency to let others choose for us, which I suppose is what I have been doing here! Readers will have their favourites, and will no doubt be silently cursing me for not mentioning so and so. There is nothing wrong with that, as the whole experience of listening to music is, and must necessarily be, subjective.
I hope, however, that I have been able to help you understand the nature of the baritone voice, and the many nuances within it, and that you can now appreciate the various categories that exist. To misquote the doctor in Tony Hancock’s immortal sketch, “We’re not all bass-baritones, you know!”
